I think I already retweeted this article, but it's depressing and chilling and important, and I want to dig into it a little bit. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/children-of-qanon-believers_n_601078e9c5b6c5586aa49077

I think the biggest thing I took away from it is that "Qanon is a cult" is not a metaphor. It's literal. This is a religious movement. It's evangelicalism but acceptable to people who don't want to seem too Christian-y.

Obviously, it's not mutually exclusive with Christianity. There are plenty of Christian Qanon believers. But I think what's most disturbing is the number of pathways to viewing Trump as a messiah figure that are out there targeting different audiences.

So according to a recent poll, 56% of Republicans believe Qanon claims. Roughly 25% of the country identifies as Republican, so doing some back-of-the-envelope math, that's 39 million people.

https://civiqs.com/reports/2020/9/2/report-americans-pessimistic-on-time-frame-for-coronavirus-recovery

In other words, that's possibly the biggest cult there's ever been in the US. Like, Scientology peaked at about 100,000 people.

And I think we should take it seriously as a cult.

Part of what's so heartbreaking about this article is the number of teens in it who are dealing with their parents being indoctrinated.

I mean, we've got the financially disastrous stuff:

We've got afterlife claims:

It's got the moral panic elements:

It's got the Rapture:

And it's got that thing apocalyptic religious sects do when the promised apocalypse doesn't happen on schedule: they move the goalposts and redefine how it's supposed to happen:

It's got the thing where it isolates initiates from non-believers:

The really tragic thing about all of this is that it doesn't even seem to include most of the stuff that most cults offer, at least initially, that feels positive. It's not, even on the surface level, helping people get control over their lives, it's not love-bombing them:

Like, literally ALL it seems to offer is the sense of having secret insider knowledge, and the promise of victory over the Other.

It's the vindictive triumphalism of evangelical Christianity to the nth degree.

But it doesn't even seem to offer the honeymoon stage of most cults, or evangelical Christianity: a community that seems welcoming and loving, a temporary high.

Its adherents mostly seem stressed out.

And I mean, that isolation from non-believers aspect is sad enough when it's parents of adult children, but it's fucking heartbreaking when the children aren't adult or are barely adult.

And like so many cults, it's taking an anti-medical stance that's potentially deadly.

And again, like many cults, it preys on older people who don't have the technically literacy to get good information:

I mean, I feel like the main sticking point about treating it seriously as a cult is that it doesn't really have a centralized leader who's financially benefiting. (Yes, there's Q, but he can't really function fully in that role since he's anonymous.)

I mean, at some point we're going to have to talk about how we give the whole "natural wellness" industry a pass because we associate it with harmless hippie types when it's actually a radicalization vector.

And, I mean, listen to the people who've lost family members to it about how this is a religious movement.

And again, like a cult, it doesn't just isolate adherents from nonbelieving *people,* it isolates them from outside sources of information.

And the frustrating thing is there doesn't seem to be help for people who are losing their parents to this.

The reason I'm hammering so hard on the Qanon-religion thing is that we actually do have research and practices around getting people out of cults. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/magazine/how-to-get-someone-out-of-a-cult.html

But, as the children of Qanon believers in this article lament, there isn't any centralized resource like that for Qanon.

And there needs to be.

But until we treat it like what it is, I don't think we're going to be effective at freeing people from it.

And I started thinking about this again today because I was listening to the @MaintenancePod episode on Dr. Oz.

The podcast is great; you should listen to all the episodes, especially since it's relatively new and there aren't that many yet.

But what struck me, given how many Q believers there seem to be who used to be Democrats, is how there are actually radicalization vectors aiming at the center and left and not just the right and we need to talk about how they're priming people for this stuff.

Like one of the many reasons Dr. Oz is awful that the podcast drilled down on is the whole green coffee bean debacle. Listen to the ep if you want the details, but basically, Dr. Oz touted green coffee as a miracle weight-loss cure and the background is AWFUL.

But like so many things, he touted this as something "western medicine doesn't want you to know about."

And as the hosts point out, if there were a miracle weight-loss "cure" out there, why the fuck wouldn't doctors want you to know about it? The obesity epidemic is one of America's favorite moral panics.

Hell, when I was a 5'5" 25-year-old who weighed 120 lbs and I went to a doctor because I was dealing with insomnia, he told me if I lost weight it would help.

If there were an easy "cure" for being overweight, doctors would be prying people's mouths open and forcing it down.

But when the whole green coffee scam more or less collapsed, and Dr. Oz got called in front of Congress, and he deflected criticism with the argument that it was alternative medicine, and therefore couldn't be critiqued by Western standards.

The thing is, though, that this extract wasn't part of some non-Western system of medicine. It was just shit that some company came up with.

But it's an argument that generally will resonate with people on the left: the idea of decentering Western standards in evaluating claims.

And when you're talking about about non-Western *cultures* and *systems,* that's a good idea.

Dr. Oz, however, uses it to shield a Western weight-loss scam from criticism that studies don't back up its efficacy.

And this is in the framing of "this is something Western Medicine doesn't want you to know about."

Like, it's priming people not to trust agreed-upon facts, not to trust science, and, in fact, to view evidence to the contrary as a reason to double down on belief. (It's because Western doctors don't WANT you to know about the secret weight-loss cure.)

But this isn't aimed at hardcore conservatives. It's aimed at Oprah viewers. And it's using a relatively liberal or even leftist framing of not viewing everything through a Western lens.

So, arguably, a lot of the wellness industry is already priming people to be open to conspiracy theories when it comes to medicine (and not the conspiracies that are out in the open, like all the ways the healthcare industry extorts people).

So when people are exposed to Qanon during a pandemic, and it's telling them not to trust doctors and scientists about COVID? or about the vaccine?

And weirdly, distrust of modern medicine is somewhere where hippie environmentalist types and conservative Christians can get together.

You know where else they get together?

Antisemitism. Somehow whether you're anti-capitalist or anti-communist, it's all the fault of the Jews. And it's a big, complicated conspiracy.

Never mind that anyone who thinks we're running some sort of complicated conspiracy should be forced to sit through a single Temple board meeting.

You'd be disabused of that idea right quick.

But Qanon, with its cannibalism and pedophilia scares, is drawing from the old blood libels, like the idea that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make matzah.

That's a whole thread in itself, but here's a wealth of info: https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1300792565428559877